Rembrandt Fake or Fortune?

19 million.

The art world.

Glamour, wealth, intrigue.

95. Selling at 95 million.

Beneath the surface, there's a darker place,

a world of high stakes and gambles.

International art dealer Philip Mould knows the risks.

He hunts down sleepers -

paintings that hide dark secrets.

In the past, we looked at pictures.

Now, almost, you can look through them.

Paint almost acts like blood at a crime scene.

I'm Fiona Bruce, and I have over 20 years' experience as a journalist.

Every picture tells its own story,

and it's up to us to try and uncover it.

We're teaming up to investigate

the human dramas and mysterious tales locked in paint.

It's a world that spans continents.

It can take you anywhere at any moment.

Less than 24 hours ago, I was in London.

Suddenly, I had to drop everything and fly all the way down here

to Cape Town in South Africa, to pick up a painting that could be

by one of the world's great masters, by Rembrandt.

But whoever's painted it,

I do know it has a dark and fascinating history.

Wow, look at the difference now.

Look at that picture now.

This painting will bring us within touching distance

of one of the greatest artists that ever lived.

It's a bit like a religious ritual, by which you anoint the picture.

It will require an investigation that reaches into the highest ranks of Nazi Germany...

This almost certainly relates to the forced sale of the picture.

..and test our team to its limits.

This is getting so complicated.

This story began with an excited call from Philip.

I needed to see him at base, quickly.

His head of research, Dr Bendor Grosvenor, was waiting,

and time was not on our side.

So, why have you got me here in such a hurry?

The best way of explaining that is for you to see the picture. Bendor?

This emerged a few days ago. Bendor found it on the computer.

It's a picture coming up for sale in South Africa, in Cape Town.

It looked interesting, so we decided to look into it.

It looked like something that could be a very good spec,

as we say in the trade.

What caught my eye is this looks like a period painting

done almost 400 years ago, but the estimate is only £800.

Which is astonishingly cheap.

Yes, fantastically cheap for a pretty good picture from the period.

The second thing that caught my eye is the guy's face.

-I seem to remember I've seen it before somewhere.

-You just remembered the look of this chap?

Yes. As a bit of a portrait anorak, I try and remember faces as much as possible.

So I went through some old catalogues. Here he is -

the same sitter, I think, in two paintings by Rembrandt himself.

So you're doing all this to try and show

that that painting up for sale in South Africa

is perhaps not just by a follower of Rembrandt,

-but by Rembrandt himself?

-It could be by Rembrandt, but, at the very least,

we're dealing with a painting that was painted in his circle

or possibly in his studio, and maybe by the master himself.

So, this is an interesting picture,

it's a picture of considerable quality,

but it was in the process of looking into it that a darker side emerged.

Oh?

This painting was sold at auction in 1935 in Berlin

and it came, it says here, from the Van Diemen Gallery.

The Van Diemen Gallery belonged to the Oppenheimers,

and the Oppenheimers were Jews,

forced to flee when the Nazis came to power.

All of their stock was seized by the Nazis

and placed under the administration of one of Goering's right-hand men

and sold at auction for a fraction of its value.

Ah, I'm beginning to get the idea.

So this painting that is up for sale in South Africa

almost certainly is in fact a stolen painting, stolen by the Nazis?

Mmm. It's almost certainly what we call a spoliated painting,

-which is in effect stolen.

-Gosh.

There's absolutely nothing to suggest at this stage at all

that the people who are selling this know about it,

nor indeed do the auction house know about its history.

-How long till this thing goes up for sale?

-It's 4:00 now.

-This picture's coming up when, Bendor?

-4:00 tomorrow.

-24 hours.

-Right.

So we need to find some answers, and fast.

Is the picture in South Africa just a modern copy?

Did it belong to the Oppenheimers?

I'm keen to find out more about them.

They owned the Van Diemen Gallery that had the picture in the '30s.

Living in Berlin at that time,

Jakob and Rosa Oppenheimer would have witnessed the rise of Nazism.

They fled from Berlin in April 1933 and went to Paris.

I guess they thought they'd be safe there.

But in 1940, Hitler invaded France.

Now, Jakob died in Nice in 1941.

Rosa was sent to a concentration camp. She died at Auschwitz in 1943.

Somehow, their children survived.

So, they do have living descendants,

who may have a claim on this painting.

Well, since the 1935 auction,

the Oppenheimers' pictures have been scattered all over the world.

But early in 2009,

the descendants of the Oppenheimers found three of those paintings.

They were in a museum in California, and the State of California

has since decided to return those pictures to the Oppenheimer family.

Here is the Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger,

standing beside two of the descendants,

Peter Bloch on the left

and Inge Blackshear on the right,

at the ceremony when they returned the paintings.

But in this murky world, the laws about returning paintings,

or restituting them, as it's known, differ from country to country.

To avoid getting bogged down in the legalities, I need some advice.

Next morning, I visit Anne Webber of the Looted Art Commission in London.

You would think that things that were stolen, if everybody's agreed

that they were taken under terrible circumstances,

you should be able to get them back wherever they are.

But no. The justice you get depends on the accident of geography.

The accident of where the work of art has come to rest.

In this case, we know that there is a lawyer who represents the Oppenheimer family.

She's a French lawyer living in Paris, or working from Paris,

and the right thing to do is to contact her,

ask her, "Is this painting on your list of missing paintings?"

And then to see what she would like to do about it.

Back at base, we're sending the limited information we have on the painting to the lawyer in Paris.

We can't stop the auction ourselves. We have no claim on the painting,

and with only five hours left till bidding starts,

we need to know if she's able to stop the sale.

-'Bonjour.'

-Ah, bonjour. Puis-je parler avec Eva Sterzing?

'Yes. Hold the line, please.'

MUSIC PLAYS

My guess is that Eva Sterzing's busy looking into her records.

She's only had the details for about half an hour,

so I can hardly expect her to come up with an immediate answer.

And I bet you she'll be surprised.

Hello. Is that Eva Sterzing?

Hi, this is Philip Mould.

How are you?

Have you received the information that I've sent you?

As I understand it, there is no guarantee,

far from it, that the auction house will withdraw this picture, so...

This is all a bit of a gamble.

Raising questions over the painting's past

could mire it in lengthy legal disputes.

The owner may dispose of the picture secretly,

so it just disappears from sight.

It's still showing it for sale,

but sometimes these things move quite slowly.

I wouldn't like to be told that my picture was Nazi booty, would you?

What I'm finding rather frustrating is you and I know that this picture

is considerably more interesting than it appears on the screen.

I still want to get my hands on it.

It's frustrating to wait, knowing there's nothing more we can do.

PHONE RINGS

Hi.

Do you have some news?

I'll come through now.

Hi. Just had a call from Rudd's in South Africa,

and the picture has been withdrawn.

So the lawyer's letter has clearly had an effect.

Must have done. They didn't give any reasons.

They just said something about an ownership dispute.

Thankfully, we've managed to stop the auction.

Now, two questions need answering.

I'm desperate to discover who painted the picture.

Could it be by Rembrandt?

And I want to know who the rightful owner is.

To investigate, we need more than a computer image.

We need the painting itself.

So, one overnight flight later, here I am in Cape Town.

I've been given permission to take the picture temporarily for testing in Europe.

While I'm here, I can find out more about the painting

and its owner from the auctioneer, Charles Rudd.

-Hi, I'm Fiona Bruce. Charles, I presume.

-Yes, welcome to Rudd's.

-Nice to see you.

-So, where is it?

Right here. Follow me.

After you.

How exciting. I'm the first one to have a good look at it.

Absolutely.

Well, I have to say, when I saw it on the computer back in London,

I was expecting something smaller, and, actually, not as vivid as this.

-Yes.

-I was worried that I might be slightly unimpressed by it,

but, actually, I think it's rather wonderful.

Yes. I think it's got a lot of pathos,

and I think there's a lot of feeling in it, as a painting.

Tell me how you came by it, how this painting came to your attention.

Well, the owner of this painting,

we've had dealings with over a couple of years.

He did take about four of his paintings to another auction house,

and two of those paintings were unsold at that auction.

-And this was one of them?

-Yes.

And is it because he'd failed to sell it before

-that he put it on at quite a low price?

-Yes.

He didn't want the painting back,

and he didn't want them to handle the resale of the painting,

so he gave it to us and we came to an agreement

to put what we considered a fair estimate

to draw some interest to the painting.

In sterling, it was just about under £1,000, wasn't it?

Yes.

I'd very much like to meet the owner while I'm here.

Is that going to be possible?

I have asked him whether he would like to attend today,

but, unfortunately, he didn't feel he wanted to.

And how did he come by the painting?

-He inherited it, did he?

-Yes.

Now, we did know that the owner, Peter Schaary,

inherited this painting in 1978, and this is written by his father,

"Bequeathed as a gift to my son." The other thing was...

I was going to say, that was the first thing I noticed

when you turned it round.

-What does this mean?

-We're not sure.

-It looks like a sort of fascist label.

-It does, instantly.

As if it had been in some storage warehouse somewhere.

-Now that is a bit chilling, isn't it?

-Mmm.

-Philip, it's Fiona.

-'Hello. How are you getting on?'

Well, I have it in front of me, which is very exciting.

It's much more... It's much richer, it's much more colourful,

it's much more interesting as a painting, to my uneducated eye,

now seeing it in real life. Are there any obvious things

I should be looking at before we wrap it up?

'What we do know is, in 1935 when it was measured,

'the dimensions were approximately 52 by 38cm.'

Well, it's 51. 50.5... Hang on.

-Charles is very helpfully measuring it.

-By 38.

By 38. And you were thinking...

-'That's good enough.'

-That's good enough, is it? OK. Anything else?

-'Does it have a gold frame?'

-It does have a gold frame.

-'Does it look like quite an old frame to you?'

-Well...

How old would you think it is?

I think this frame may be from the '60s or '70s.

Oh, he thinks it might be from the '60s or '70s.

'May have lost its original frame. Not a problem.

'From what you've told me,

'it looks a highly likely picture. So in your situation,

'I'd wrap it up and take it home.'

The present owner may not want to meet me,

but it's a good sign that he's willing to entrust the painting to us to undergo investigation.

Well, here it is. Yikes! I'm pretty terrified, actually,

about taking this on a plane back overnight.

Apparently the guy who brought it to the auction house

in the first place, who owns it at the moment,

brought it along the Skeleton Coast of Namibia,

bouncing around in the back of his Land Rover.

So who knows? Hopefully, I won't do too bad a job of it.

In Paris, the Oppenheimers' lawyer can give us more information

about the possible ownership of the painting.

Eva Sterzing has spent many years battling to find and return the Oppenheimer collection.

Two years after they fled Germany, their Van Diemen Gallery

was put into liquidation by the Nazis.

The pictures were sold at knockdown prices

at what's been called Judenauktion, or Jewish auctions.

Thanks to the Nazis, the paintings, including masterpieces by Titian,

Van Dyck and Rubens, passed into new hands.

They were very well-known art dealers

and they had very fine paintings.

And then these auctions, which you call Judenauktion...

..they sold all these paintings.

I have got this in my catalogues.

They put a little...little...

..rosa...

red stickers like this.

"Unlimitiert" - without limit.

Here's one. That's why you call it verschleudern.

You throw it on the market.

Because in the end, you could buy something for one mark.

That one was restituted a long time ago.

Having spent so many years working to restitute the Oppenheimer estate to its rightful heirs,

Eva has grown to know descendants Peter Bloch and Inge Blackshear as friends.

She is all too aware of how important

regaining their inheritance is to them, and to others like them.

I've known them since such a long time and I know how it is important.

Because the Jews were persecuted in Germany,

and persecution means everything.

I saw it with them in California.

It is very good for them.

They feel like having been...

That it is recognised, the persecution.

Yeah, here it is.

With the picture now withdrawn from the Cape Town sale and on its way back to London,

Eva is keen to reunite her clients with the painting taken in such terrible circumstances.

Whenever you steal something from somebody, you are only satisfied

once the thief is in prison or you get it back, your property.

I'm a little like a detective when I find something.

It's also fun...

to chase art, isn't it?

As Fiona arrives back from Cape Town on the red-eye,

I'll be able to get a better idea whether the painting really is,

without doubt, the looted picture and not a cheap modern copy.

-Special delivery.

-Welcome back.

-You've got it.

-Yes! Here it is.

-I'm so excited.

-I know.

I was terrified, carrying this on the plane.

I always get this rather uncertain feeling at this stage,

when the picture is opened in London.

It's come from another part of the world.

It always looks different somehow in the London light.

I'm dying to know what you make of it.

You can't get away from the fact that he still looks like

a grumpy old chap standing there,

but it's got a depth that I hadn't appreciated until I saw it.

The moment of truth approaches.

-Here we go.

-Are you ready?

Get on with it.

What do you think?

That looks interesting. I have to say I do think that it's a period work.

It's got that sort of gnarled intensity

that you associate with Rembrandt and his circle.

And this looks like a wonderfully-hewn piece of oak,

possibly Baltic oak.

Just the sort of thing that one would be looking for

for a 17th-century picture.

I think there's a possibility that we can find out who this is by,

but the real thing is, is it the picture that we think it is,

the Oppenheimer picture?

We could put some white spirit on it.

I don't think we'd damage the picture in so doing.

-White spirit takes off paint.

-Nah. Well, it can do,

but not old, solid varnish like this.

And you're going to do it for me.

You want me to put this white spirit on this painting,

follower of Rembrandt, hundreds of years old? Are you sure?

No, this is white spirit.

It's not acetone. It doesn't actually take off the varnish.

Go on, live dangerously.

-Like that?

-That's it.

-Oh!

Look at the drapery on that.

-Terrifying!

-Look at the shadow underneath the drapery,

how the drapery comes forward now.

Actually, I can see, that is amazing.

Isn't that better? It's a bit like water when it goes over pebbles.

On a dirty picture like this, you can get a hint, a taste,

of what it might be when it's clean.

'Although I wouldn't advise anyone else trying this, for a minute or two while wet,

'the old varnish becomes transparent, allowing the depth of the painting to shine through.'

We haven't got long, cos it's going to evaporate off.

-So you've just got to...

-Wow. Look at the difference now.

Look at that picture now.

It's like a fish coming out of the water, isn't it?

-Wow.

-I mean, you can see that it's a work of some quality,

and definitely has the feel of an early painting.

This painting is definitely holding a lot of secrets.

But so often in this world,

the back of a picture can tell you more than the front.

Well, that looks like an 18th-century wax collector's seal.

So that tells us, almost certainly, that this isn't a modern fake.

The panel looks right for the period.

It's been chamfered in the right way.

We've got the three quarters here,

and they make this incision into the edge,

so you can frame it properly.

There's also some writing on the frame here.

-This looks like a German script, doesn't it?

-Does it?

How can you tell?

-It says "lieb". "Lieben", or something.

-There've been some wonderful moments

when we've looked at the back of pictures.

Just as we begin to think we've got some missing art,

we work out the words and it's something like,

"Hang to left of door".

Come on, Bendor, what about this? This is what got me excited.

Well, this one is...

It's not very easily discernable at the moment.

If it was a whopping great big swastika, we'd know more about it.

It has a fascistic air about it.

You're right, because this little thing in the middle,

this little bundle of sticks tied together, is a fasces,

and that was what the early fascists used as a symbol.

That's where they get the term "fascist" from.

One always has that element of uncertainty before a picture arrives

that you've only known from digital images.

It's now here, we've seen it, and it's unquestionably old.

Just how old is something that we need to determine.

And it seems to have all the evidence

to suggest that it is the Oppenheimers' picture.

To me, it's covered with fingerprints,

we just need to read them.

The next place I want to go is here, the Witt Library.

This is the Scotland Yard of the art world

with images and information on over a million pictures.

It was here that Bendor discovered the link between our picture

and the Van Diemen sale. I want Fiona to see that evidence for herself.

Always wanted to do this.

Right, lead on.

In these files are just so many answers.

I mean, it's a bit like with crime scenes.

You have to library all the evidence,

library the DNA and then, using it later on, you can establish things.

Any picture that has been in a prominent public collection or an auction or with a dealer

in the last 100 years, the chances are you can find it here.

-Right.

-Staggering, really.

God, there's a lot of Rembrandt. New Testament?

I love the smell of it, don't you? Sort of leather and...

Kind of musty...

Self-portraits, Old Testament etchings... Oh, portraits.

His father and his brother.

Over to you.

This is a fantastic resource.

I once found a missing link here

that proved a lacklustre landscape was really a Gainsborough.

Just look how many images there are, just for the father.

-And they're all of his dad?

-Well, they're purported to be of his dad,

-but there's no evidence for that.

-Oh, I see. So it could be anybody?

It could be anybody, probably a studio model.

-That's definitely our chap, isn't it?

-This is the same guy.

-Yeah.

The set of the eyes, the shape of the nose, and that slightly sort of,

"How long am I going to have to sit for?" model look.

And Rembrandt would have chosen this chap to paint because he had an interesting face, a lived-in face?

-Yeah.

-Is that right?

-Yes, absolutely.

Rembrandt was always looking for

different types of human expression, thought and insight.

-If he found a good face...

-He stuck with them.

A good face is worth having. A lot of would-be Rembrandts.

I'm looking at so many that are similar, I can't remember what ours looks like any more.

-Oh!

-Here it is.

Right, OK.

-Talk about incriminating evidence.

-This is what Bendor saw.

Yes. It's one and the same thing, isn't it?

"Van Diemen sale, Graupe, Berlin, 26-29 April, 1935."

Isn't it extraordinary? Picture comes up in South Africa,

we here in the Witt Library in London,

photograph, ancient information, put it all together.

-It's like a trail of clues, isn't it?

-Yeah.

Although we know that the painting that was for sale in Cape Town

is definitely the Nazi painting,

there are still many questions to answer.

Hang on, because this says Rembrandt,

and yet the picture in Cape Town

is described as being by a follower of Rembrandt.

So how can you tell the difference?

You're asking an absolutely crucial question. It's the difference

between the master and a follower or an assistant.

I'll tell you what, we can go to the National Gallery.

There you can see some real Rembrandts.

Rembrandt was the greatest Dutch artist of the 17th century,

a time when Dutch painting was the envy of Europe.

But while many of his contemporaries excelled in landscapes

and still-lives, Rembrandt became famous as a master of the human face.

The National Gallery holds

a wonderful collection of his portraits.

Now, even I recognise this self-portrait.

Two things jump out at me. He's not flattering himself obviously, is he?

Also, he looks either slightly querulous or very slightly anxious.

I'm not quite sure which it is. But you can see that in his expression.

Absolutely. That's exactly what makes this a fascinating picture.

It's not obvious. It's not someone laughing or sad or angry.

It teeters on the edge, one feeling teetering into the other.

It's just incredibly clever.

You can tell a Rembrandt portrait by the superior way

he portrays a subject's character and emotion,

with nothing more than inspired brushstrokes.

There's no vagueness in a Rembrandt.

I read that Hitler was a great fan of Rembrandt's,

which is surprising in one sense

in that Rembrandt mixed with and painted a lot of Jewish people.

Why do you think Hitler was such a fan?

Because Rembrandt is the ultimate trophy.

I mean, Rembrandt is a by-word for artistic genius.

What he wanted was these bits of booty himself around him

as a form of aggrandisement.

-Take a look at this, Fiona. It's got no label on it.

-Right.

Tell me what you think of this.

What, in terms of is it a Rembrandt or not?

Yeah, quality. Is it a Rembrandt?

Oh, God. I don't know.

Well, OK, from what I've learned from the master...

I also could make a complete fool of myself now!

I would say it's not as fine

as the ones we've seen. Even though those are not photographic

in the way they portray the faces, they are very clear.

You're going to tell me this is a Rembrandt, aren't you?

When I'm saying it doesn't particularly look like a Rembrandt.

-I can reveal to you it is not a Rembrandt.

-Ooh!

-But it was thought to be a Rembrandt.

-Oh, right. OK.

It was demoted in the 1960s.

But it's very difficult, because you can't just say,

"It's got the right paint and it's from the right period

"and this is the sort of subject he does." There are subtle differences

in the quality of the handwriting, as it were.

If it was originally thought that this was a Rembrandt,

it's possible that this came from the studio of Rembrandt,

-from one of his pupils, is it?

-Yeah.

He had around him a group of people, assistants, pupils if you want,

people who would actually, as he worked on a picture,

quite often sit around and do the same model, the same object.

Rembrandt could do it from one angle

and two or three other people could do it from other angles.

He had a sort of industry going on.

-These were apprentices, effectively?

-Apprentices, pupils, yes.

These were people who could also supply pictures which he could sell.

So you could get a copy of a Rembrandt

or you could get an original Rembrandt.

With Philip eager to uncover the mysteries of our painting,

I want to learn more about how art was systematically looted

by the Nazis in the years before the Second World War.

As well as housing an impressive array of machines to excite the imagination of any schoolboy,

the Imperial War Museum holds a wealth of rare archive film

that documents the rise of Nazism

from the days before our painting was looted.

Archive that historian James Taylor has arranged to show me.

This is a crowd listening to the propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels,

who is announcing a one-day boycott of Jewish shops throughout the country

and the intention was that this would stop non-Jewish people buying from Jewish shopkeepers.

-Gosh. And when was this?

-The end of March 1933.

March 31st to be specific.

So this is only two months since Adolf Hitler's become Chancellor.

-He didn't waste any time, did he?

-No, absolutely not.

And this is the beginning of the creeping and increasing legislation

against the Jews as Hitler became more powerful.

Yes. I mean, I think the key years are really 1935

when the Reich citizenship law is brought in

and that effectively makes Jews second-class citizens.

Then they turn their attention wholesale

to the possessions of Jews. The focus of Nazi antisemitic law

is to force Jews to emigrate.

The irony of that is that they actually put obstacles in their path,

one of which was that they weren't allowed to take their assets with them.

So they insisted that all Jewish artworks,

shares and bonds be declared. It was either taken forcibly

or, after the Jews were deported, then the property was taken.

Not all Jews were as wealthy as Jakob and Rosa Oppenheimer,

with the funds to buy expensive paintings,

but it's estimated that, by the end of the war,

one third of all the world's art treasures had been looted by the Nazis.

Paintings by Da Vinci, Raphael and others adorned the walls of the Nazi leaders.

When it came to art, were there Nazis who were particularly interested in it per se?

Well, Goering, most famously,

is the person who was interested in art. Hitler, of course...

-Was a watercolourist.

-That's right.

And he wanted to establish certainly a kind of Fuhrer museum.

But it's also worth pointing out

that they were very particular about the type of art that they wanted.

Anything that they considered degenerate -

which was, generally speaking modernist art - was destroyed.

I think it's fascinating and horrifying in equal measure

to see quite how systematically the Nazis stripped away

everything from the Jews that made them human, really.

I hadn't realised the Nazis were so keen to force the Jews to emigrate.

I didn't realise that was part of their master plan.

Of course, the Oppenheimers in '33 left Germany, they did emigrate.

They had to leave everything behind, including their painting.

A painting Bendor has news of back at base.

Well, Anne Webber from the Commission for Looted Art in Europe has been in touch.

She and her team have made the most fantastic discovery.

Our picture was listed by the Nazis in 1934

as a work of national treasure,

which meant that it couldn't be exported from the country

and Anne and her team have kindly sent us a copy of the list from a few years later in 1938.

Here it is. It's the second picture down, artist Rembrandt on the left

and then "Bildnis seines Vaters in Pantasietracht".

It means, basically, portrait of the father in fancy dress.

And you can see all these pictures are by Rembrandt van Rijn.

And this is extraordinary.

I'm just trying to keep up with what this means.

-They thought it was a Rembrandt...

-Indeed, yes.

-..and as a Rembrandt,

was of national importance to the heritage...

This puts a whole different historical slant on it.

It moves from albeit an important old master picture to a national treasure.

I mean, whatever the picture is, whatever we catalogue it as now,

whoever painted this, this was, in its day, something of supreme importance.

Obviously in their day, they were pretty convinced it was by Rembrandt,

otherwise they wouldn't have catalogued it as a national treasure, I assume.

-Yes.

-So we really do need to find out who it's by.

If we can find out who painted our picture,

then we can also get closer to a fair valuation for its owners.

So I've come to Amsterdam where Rembrandt lived from 1639 onwards.

So why am I here in Amsterdam?

I'm here to see probably the greatest Rembrandt connoisseur of our times, Ernst Van de Wetering.

As chairman of the Rembrandt Research Project, he knows more about Rembrandt than anybody else alive.

If he says your unknown 17th-century canvas is by Rembrandt,

it could be worth £25 million, let's say.

If not, just a few thousand dollars.

This man's got the power of a Roman emperor.

So, here it is.

'Ernst has so much knowledge and experience, he may well be able to give an instant opinion.'

The first response is that it is...

..a 17th-century painting.

But the question is, is the painting made by Rembrandt?

The answer is no, because it's not signed.

-It's as simple as that, is it?

-It is very simple.

The technique is similar, very similar. Judging from the technique,

it must have been done in his studio

and he must have seen it, this painting.

Each studio had its own paint recipes.

I wouldn't say there were buckets of paint where they picked paint from,

but in his Rembrandt school, they used the same matter

and the behaviour of the matter was comparable.

Some of it flows easily,

other paint drags over the surface and behaves in a specific way.

So what I see here, you could also see on a Rembrandt.

'So the painting is not by Rembrandt, but it's definitely connected to the great man.

'With the help of Ernst and the team he works with, we can still find out who painted this picture.

'Applying state-of-the-art techniques, step by step,

'they can delve deeper and deeper into the creation of our painting.'

I think it's best we start with the head and from there we can orient ourselves more easily.

'An infrared camera will allow us

'to look beneath the surface of the painting

'and see the artist's preparation, known as the reserve.'

There is...around the feather,

you see the shape

making a reserve for a wider feather than you see now on the painting.

This is most probably a change in the conception of the painting.

-That's thrilling. Like a poet missing a line and then adding one.

-Yes, yes.

But look at this hat. I mean, this hat was once enormous.

Look at the edge there.

It looks like one of those great big, floppy Rembrandt hats.

Yeah, it could be.

Or, I mean, the turban.

You would expect a turban, but he gets a very small cap.

But it may have been a different shape originally.

So what we're seeing is an artist trying to find an artistic solution.

-Yes.

-In other words, an original painting and not a copy.

Yes, we can be sure about that.

'Already, our picture is revealing its past.

'It shows an artist changing his mind whilst painting.

'So it's an original work.

'A copy would not have these tell-tale signs beneath the surface.

'But we need more investigation to find out who it's actually by.

'So it's now in the expert hands of Martin Bijl

'who's a restorer extraordinaire.

'I'm intrigued by a series of faint marks at the bottom of the picture.

'Could it be a signature? His trained eye might just be able to find it.

'If it exists, it could reveal what we're eager to know.'

Now, Martin, I've got to ask you,

can you make out anything in the bottom left-hand corner?

Is there a possible signature?

I've just had a first look at it

and it ends with a date - 1639 or 1635.

But then before this date, something is written

and that's partly over-painted.

-Mm-hmm.

-That suggests that somebody painted over the signature

without knowing what he did.

He didn't even paint over everything because...

..one or two centimetres before,

there is also the remains of a signature which is not retouched.

So there is more,

and I think we only can confirm by looking through a microscope

because the over-paintings are too thick and too opaque.

It's a bit of a muddle, isn't it?

Yeah.

That's why restorers like to clean this kind of picture

because we want to reveal these problems.

'The Amsterdam experts will continue their investigations,

'confident that we can put a name to its creator.'

This compelling, and it is compelling, process of attribution

that's going on all around me is central to our world.

It's a bit like a religious ritual, by which the painting gets anointed.

It's only by knowing when something was painted

or, best of all, who painted it,

that art historians have got something to grab onto, to hold onto.

People who buy pictures will take out cheques and sign them when they've got that.

It's riveting. The picture itself hasn't changed physically at all.

But already it's growing in stature

from the follower of Rembrandt that was at auction for just £1,000.

With the painting yielding more and more secrets to Philip,

I'm keen to uncover just how far Nazi looting spread.

When Europe was liberated after the war,

Goering's personal stash of looted art was discovered.

A multi-million-pound haul that read like a Who's Who of the greats of the art world.

But we've barely found the tip of the iceberg.

So much was stolen that it's estimated that art worth up to £20 billion remains missing.

And the Nazis stole art not just from the Jews

but from anyone they considered to be an enemy of the state.

Adam Zamoyski is trying to locate items taken from his Polish grandmother's art gallery.

He wants to recover them to create a public museum for Poland to be proud of.

The Nazis behaved completely differently in Poland

to the way they behaved anywhere else -

in Belgium or France or anywhere else.

They were determined to destroy the Polish upper classes and intelligentsia anyway,

but they also confiscated everything.

All Polish property was simply liable to confiscation.

So the Germans started sending these things to different places

because they had their great plans for the Fuhrer's museum in Linz

and then Goering took a few

and the frightful governor of Poland, Hans Frank,

had in his bedroom that Raphael.

-So this was in your family museum?

-That's right.

-And the Nazis took it?

Yes. It's thought to be a self-portrait by Raphael and disappeared without trace.

-And this is all you've got? A black and white image?

-Exactly.

-And you've no idea where it is?

-No.

Every single lead has been chased up.

It's probably the most valuable looted object still out there from the Second World War.

Of all of them. Really?

So several millions, I imagine.

Oh, hundreds of millions.

I mean, you know, there wouldn't be a museum in the western world

that wouldn't do anything to get hold of it.

Bite your arm off to have it.

I see it as a personal duty to try and reconstitute these collections

and to make them available because it was put together by ancestors

whom I actually rather admire and who I'm, sort of, quite fond of.

But, also, I see it almost as a moral duty to the people of Poland.

'In Amsterdam, I'm hoping that pigment expert Karin Groen

'will be able to get closer to an attribution.

'Is that a signature in the bottom left-hand corner?

'Under her microscopic scrutiny, a dark secret begins to emerge.'

I started with these larger retouchings

in what could be a signature,

but then when we move on, one can see that also what...

..could be numbers...

The 6 was mentioned and a 3.

Yes, I've always assumed that was the date.

Yeah, but they seem to have been made in paint used for retouching.

So later, I think.

Ah. So you're telling me that your microscope tells you

-that the whole signature is added, the whole date, everything?

-Yeah.

That sounds like a rather clear conclusion then, doesn't it?

-Bit disappointing.

-I'd love to have a look down the lens myself.

-I don't disbelieve you for a moment.

-It's bang in the middle here.

Oh, crikey, I see what you mean.

I've seen this so many times before

but not quite as graphically as this.

-There's a sort of smeary, dishonest layer above, isn't there?

-Yeah.

Above what?

The paint looks really different.

-Really different.

-Kind of smeary.

And then as I pass it along...

to where the date is, the date is the same smeary paint.

-Mm.

-There's so signature here at all, is there, really?

-Well, no evidence of one.

-No.

So any hopes of identifying the painting by signature have foundered.

It was added later, maybe in the 19th century,

possibly in an effort to pass it off as a Rembrandt.

It is great that we're finding out more and more about the painting now

but my research has thrown up a disturbing new revelation

which is there is a second claim on this picture now.

We knew already the Oppenheimers.

They ran the Van Diemen Gallery, it was liquidated by the Nazis.

But the painting then passed to a bank

as part repayment of a loan that had been made earlier to the Oppenheimers.

Now that bank was Jewish and its assets were then seized by the Nazis

and among those assets was our painting.

That bank no longer exists,

but its heirs are saying that they too now have a claim on our picture.

It's a very confusing situation.

Who owns this picture? And how commonly do situations like this occur with claim and counter-claim?

I've called in Anne Webber from the Looted Art Commission.

If a painting belonged to an art dealer,

the art dealers in Germany were put under enormous pressure by the Nazis once they came to power.

Really, by 1935, Jewish art dealers weren't allowed to practise in Germany.

So you might have a situation where an art dealer took out a loan from a bank

and then the collateral for that loan might have been works of art

and then the loan is called in because of the art dealer being put under so much pressure.

The loan is called in so the art works go to the bank.

The bank itself may have been Jewish-owned

and then subsequently that bank may have been seized by the Nazis or liquidated or Aryanised, taken over,

and that painting at that point belonged to the bank and it was then seized from them.

In over 60-70 years, it might be lost in the mists of time who is the rightful owner.

Because there were so many waves of dispossession by the Nazis,

you really have to unpick all that

and unravel all these different discriminatory measures that were taken

to try and understand who exactly was the owner of the painting.

So yes, you could have a situation where two different people

believe themselves to be the owner, for good reason.

Back in Amsterdam, we're reaching the final stages of our forensic research

and the last step is often the most revealing.

An X-ray image of our painting shows the artist's original sketch.

The contrast between his first sketch and the finished painting

may take us closer to understanding just who that artist was.

The technique is very similar to what we know from Rembrandt, except that Rembrandt was more outspoken.

You see the contrast, much stronger.

This is painted rather meek. It's very carefully done.

A sort of cowardly Rembrandt,

-but someone who knows Rembrandt nonetheless.

-Yes, yes.

I wouldn't say coward, but insecure.

A young boy of, we'll say, 17 or 18 years who works in his style.

Sounds as though you're homing in.

Yes.

'The team have completed their studies.

'Now it's up to Ernst to try and pull it all together

'and tell us just who this painting is by.'

My personal opinion is that the painting is very close to Isaac De Jouderville.

Isaac De Jouderville, the pupil of...

Isaac De Jouderville was a pupil of Rembrandt's

from, say, already 1627, '28, '29.

One should always be careful here.

The name of Jouderville may cover two or three young men. I mean...

..the pupils of Rembrandt do not have a very...

..stamped style of their own, er,

and so there may be different individuals

which we have made into one individual

because there is enough connection from one painting to the other

and so we call them Jouderville.

Once we focus in on the master,

what is not by him

is treated less exact as Rembrandt himself.

So, when I say it's Jouderville, it comes close to a number of paintings

which we attribute, at this moment, to Jouderville.

We have a result. The committee has decided.

Not only have we established that this is now one and the same picture

that was spoliated or force-sold by the Nazis in the 1930s,

but we now have a firm attribution.

A picture that was formerly called "follower of Rembrandt", which frankly means nothing,

is now by Isaac De Jouderville, the orphan pupil of Rembrandt himself.

It's now from his time by a firm name.

The emperor has spoken.

With our attribution work finished, we'll have to return the painting to Rudd's auction house in Cape Town.

But first it's back to London to tell the others the news.

With this new information, I reckon the painting,

which we found for sale for just £1,000,

is now worth closer to 20,000. But who was Isaac De Jouderville?

Well, he's probably best known

for being one of Rembrandt's very first pupils

and, in fact, I've got a painting here

which is thought to be one of his early self-portraits.

He joined Rembrandt's studio as an apprentice

when he was about 16 years old in 1629.

For that privilege, he would have had to pay Rembrandt about 100 Dutch guilders every year.

We know all this information because De Jouderville was an orphan

and we have copies of the receipts between Rembrandt and De Jouderville's guardians.

As an apprentice,

he would have been in the studio doing everything from mixing paints

to learning how to paint and draw.

-And clearly not paying a lot of attention to his hair.

-No!

He was pretty cool for the 1630s, I think.

In the studio, the way you learned your trade was effectively by making copies of the master's work.

This is thought to be by Jouderville, and here the Rembrandt which De Jouderville copied.

And the sharp-eyed of you will notice that there's no dog

-in De Jouderville's picture because...

-Did you notice that?

I think even I might have spotted that.

Rembrandt added his later, after De Jouderville made the copy.

I hope you're also seeing that the pose in this copy by Jouderville

is exactly the same as that of our picture.

Oh, yes. So it is, yes.

So what we've got here is not only

an important discovery of a new picture by De Jouderville,

but a fascinating piece of evidence as to how Rembrandt's studio system worked.

You can imagine De Jouderville in the studio

and when Rembrandt is using this model for his own paintings,

De Jouderville's in the corner, doing his own pictures himself.

So that would affect the value of our painting?

Most certainly. An attribution is very important.

It's like waving a magic wand over a picture.

-It turns from the anonymous to the identifiable.

-It's all very exciting,

but I have to throw a bit of a spanner in the works because there is a counter-claim to this painting.

A Jewish family who owned a bank at the time of the Second World War,

they lent money to the Oppenheimer family back in the '30s,

and they are now claiming this painting, among others,

-as collateral for that loan, all that time ago.

-How extraordinary.

This is getting more and more complicated.

Mind you, the whole thing might be academic.

The owner might not be prepared to relinquish hold of the picture. He might want to hang on to it.

-In which case no-one else can have it.

-In which case no-one can.

But we've got to go back to Cape Town, to return the picture.

-I've spoken to the owner, Peter Schaary.

-Oh, right?

-And he's agreed to meet us.

So why not, at that meeting, try and establish what he has in mind?

Whatever Mr Schaary decides,

the new claim is likely to prolong the ownership dispute.

So it's back to Cape Town to return the painting to the auction house

and a chance for us to meet the mysterious Mr Schaary.

Beautiful, sunny Cape Town. Have you been to Cape Town before, Philip?

I haven't. I must say, I absolutely adore it.

And just over there...

is where our whole story began, in Rudd's Auctioneers.

What a journey that painting's been on.

We're meeting Peter Schaary who owns this painting. What's he like?

I had a brief chat with him on the phone from Namibia. He sounds like a very reasonable guy.

I'm wondering, you know, given that this painting was sold in the Van Diemen sale,

are there Nazi antecedents in his past, in his family? Is that how he got hold of the painting?

-I'm fascinated by all that.

-You can ask him that!

What, you don't want to? I don't mind. I'll ask him.

-Shall we go?

-Let's go.

'We've already sent Mr Schaary news of what we've been able to find out

'about the painting's place in art history.

'So what can he tell us about the man who owned it, his grandfather?'

-Hello, Mr Schaary.

-Hello.

-Fiona Bruce, very nice to meet you. Hello there.

-Hi, Philip Mould.

Very nice to meet you, having spoken to you on the phone.

-Yes. Thank you very much for coming.

-A huge pleasure.

'My grandfather was in Berlin in the '20s and '30s. He was a lawyer.

'He was a very influential man.'

If your grandfather was a lawyer before the war,

what did he do during the war?

I remember he had a uniform, but he was not in the war.

Was your grandfather a Nazi? That's what I'm getting at.

No. My grandfather...

I would say no because, like I said, he was a businessman.

He was lucky in business and in private, I think.

He had enough funds...

in his life to...

..put up pictures in his house in Johannesburg

when I was, my goodness, I was 13 going on 14.

There was a Frans Hals and there was a Vermeer.

A Frans Hals and a Vermeer?

-Yes.

-Owned by your grandfather?

-Yes.

We traced this picture back - which is what piqued our interest -

back to 1935, the Van Diemen sale, which of course was a sale

of much art that had been kind of appropriated from Jewish families.

-Yes, yes.

-So did your grandfather not buy it from that sale?

-No, no.

My grandfather surely couldn't have bought it,

knowingly, that it was somebody else's, you know.

For that he had too high standing.

He couldn't do that for himself and he wouldn't have done it

because he was a very generous person all his life.

I suppose the question now is what are you going to do with it?

Would it give you a feeling of satisfaction

to see the picture returned in some way to its rightful owners?

Oh, 100%. I have no problem with that.

I inherited them. I didn't buy it.

I was given it as part of the inheritance of my mother.

I had the benefit of looking at it, enjoying it.

If it belongs to somebody else, that person should have it, you know.

So even though the painting is worth £20,000,

20 times more than he thought, Mr Schaary is still willing to give it up.

That's what we've been hoping for since the day we stopped the auction.

We've come a long way since then.

But sadly the chaos left by the Nazis has foiled our attempts

to return the painting to its rightful owner for now.

Until an agreement can be reached, this painting, like so many others

that were taken in terrible circumstances, will remain locked in limbo.

The thing is, when this all started, it was an unwanted portrait,

for sale at a knockdown price.

I mean, we've come a long way since then.

We've worked out the story of the gallery owners, the picture's dark Nazi past.

And, of course, who painted it.

Isaac De Jouderville - pupil of one of the greatest artists the world has ever seen.

Now it can claim to be within the wider world of Rembrandt.

And actually it's a 300-year-old witness to the great man himself.

It can live and breathe again.

In this series we've looked beyond pictures, into their hidden secrets.

That is very exciting.

We've found paintings that have a past, sometimes thrilling.

We've been looking at him all the time.

That was with the painting?

Sometimes dark.

All art tells a story and it's through these stories that paintings come to life.

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